BTerrell Group Blog

A customer relationship management system should be adaptable to the unique needs of any organization. For a basic out-of-the-box configuration, Sage CRM accommodates a great deal of customer and business partner information. Also, Sage CRM excels in the area of rapid modification of user screens and workflows, which enables companies to fully manage important data and business processes. This usually entails unique and proprietary information, such as product information, customer demographics and stratification, contract details, etc.

Using terminology already intrinsic to your business practices and organizational culture is essential for your users in adopting new systems. In this blog, I will focus on how Sage CRM allows administrators to quickly change the way field names are displayed on screens, so your company’s terminology stays intact. You will see this task is very easy, using the Inline Translation method in Sage CRM.

To begin, click the Customization icon, then Translations within the Sage CRM Administration area.

Next, select the box, "Inline Translation Mode”, to enable this field. Once enabled, the text objects appear with an asterisk beside it.

Now, navigate to the screen with the field you wish to re-name. In this example, I am opening the Company Screen. Let's assume I want to re-name the field labeled "Segment" to "Market."

As you see, all of the fields are showing an asterisk (*) beside the caption while in Inline Translation Mode. Click on the asterisk beside the word, “Segment”, to open the Field Inline Translation screen.

As shown below, there are multiple translation fields depending upon the number of languages previously defined in Sage CRM. The screen field is "captioned" or labeled using the translation corresponding with the language defined in user’s set-up.

Once completed, click Save, and then return to Administration>Customization>Translations and remove the check next to Inline Translation Mode.

After this simple step, you are finished! You now see the field labeled per your company's internal language. This task took less than one minute to complete!

Thank you for taking time to read my blog. We will discuss how you can add your own fields to Sage CRM screens in my next blog.

The argument between ERP "suites" and "best of breed" (BoB) applications has continued since ERP vendors first appeared. The argument seemed settled in favor of single vendor suites by the late 1990s, but today's proliferation of cloud-based business applications is heating up the debate once again.

The appeal of best of breed applications was that they focused on industry-specific or niche functionality, whereas ERP suites seemingly strived for the 80/20 rule when delivering customer requested functionality. BoB vendors argued that because they were not spreading their development budgets over a multitude of products, they could pay closer attention to the market segment they were serving and provide more detailed solutions for their customers. Additionally, they didn’t have to deal with integration issues, so they could also deploy their solutions more quickly than ERP suite solutions.

The case for ERP suites centered on having a single vendor to deal with (or a single throat to choke, depending on your perspective!) and, more importantly, seamless integration between software modules. Customers did not have to deploy the entire suite, but could implement only the modules that they required. Further, the ERP vendors proposed the following benefits:

Finally, the common user experience from using a module that is part of a single vendor suite allowed users to become cross-trained and proficient in the new programs much more quickly than with one with a new and foreign user interface.

It's worth mentioning that early on, many software suite publishers saw little benefit in providing integration interfaces to outside vendors, making integration with external applications fairly difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, most businesses chose to deploy ERP application suites during the last decade because of the reasons mentioned.

Despite the predominance of single vendor suites, businesses continued to deploy some best of breed applications. In some cases, there simply was no other solution choice available from their ERP vendor. In other instances, it was simply a matter of "decision by department", where there was no central governance to coordinate purchasing decisions. In any case, the ability to seamlessly integrate these applications was usually very limited, causing companies to employ expensive middleware solutions, use labor intensive export-translate-import procedures, or resort to manual re-entry to move data between systems.

More recently, distinctions between these choices have blurred as ERP suite vendors improve the functionality of modules and as cloud-based, best of breed applications have begun providing application programming interfaces (APIs) that enabled customers to build integrations. Some writers have gone so far as to suggest that we now live in an "API economy" where anything and everything are being connected. It should be mentioned that, while SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors may provide the ability to connect to their software, they may not manage nor support integrations with other vendors' products. Therefore, the responsibility for maintaining these integrations still rests with the customer's IT department.

In this vein, Sage provides an integrated suite of products that encompasses the essential business requirements for most organizations: accounting, distribution/supply chain, human resources, sales and marketing. Like most suites, these products are modular so that customers can select the solutions according to their company's requirements and budgets. As a Sage reseller, BTerrell Group sells and supports Sage 300 ERP, as well as the other fully integrated applications that round out Sage’s solutions, such as:

Each of these products offers fast and seamless integration with Sage 300 ERP. However, rather than enforcing a “Sage only” model, the publisher has taken a hybrid approach, combining some of the best features from both the ERP suite and the best of breed models. First, Sage 300 ERP, Sage CRM and Sage HRMS applications are either best of breed or near best of breed solutions. Secondly, each of these core applications have rich APIs that are not only the basis for deep, bi-directional integrations between the Sage products, the APIs also allow seamless and realtime integrations with other best of breed applications that are located either on site (like Accellos Warehouse Management Suite) or in the cloud (like Avalara sales tax compliance).

Using an API, external applications can start a secure session in Sage 300 ERP, and then create transactions as if it were a user. Sage 300 ERP features two types of API architectures. First, its .NET compliant XAPI provides the means for integrating the ERP with other local applications. The second and newer method is Sage’s SDATA, a web services interface with a service oriented architecture (SOA) suited for building integrations with web and cloud-based applications. This opens up the possibility of integrating Sage 300 ERP to any customer-chosen SaaS applications that provides a web services API. For those vendors that have not yet created integrations with Sage, BTerrell Group has resources that fully understand how to utilize Sage’s APIs and that can work with other vendors to develop powerful new integrations. (Just ask!)

Organizations that are currently using Sage's business applications such as Sage 300 ERP, Sage CRM and Sage HRMS, enjoy the benefits of true seamless integration between the Sage applications. Because of the development of new APIs, you may now choose to build your own powerful integrated suites using best in class applications from multiple vendors. Businesses can enjoy the benefits of tight integration between Sage products and with your chosen SaaS applications. In other words, you can now have your cake and eat it, too!

If you are interested in learning more about Sage products or how BTerrell can help you build a world-class suite of best of breed products,contact BTerrell Group for a free consultation.

Have Sage 300 ERP? Considering a CRM solution? See how Sage CRM compares to Salesforce.com.

We frequently hear from our SMB clients with Sage 300 ERP installed on-premises that the time is right to employ salesforce automation (SFA) to improve their sales processes. We usually find that Sage CRM offers 90% of the functionality that their sales team needs, and that it provides an outstanding platform to easily develop the last 10% of the requirements. Inevitably, the comparison to Salesforce.com arises, which provides much of the same functionality. CFOs must then decide which platform provides the best value.

In almost all cases where the number of potential CRM users is 5 or fewer, the existing hardware infrastructure is more than capable of handling the relatively modest resource demands of Sage CRM. The additional incremental cost of database maintenance is normally insignificant, since normally only a tweak of the current back-up plan for ERP is required. Therefore, in most cases, the total investment is equal to cost of the software plus the cost of implementation.

We usually find that Sage CRM provides the best value for companies that have deployed Sage 300 ERP. This is because the Sage 300 ERP suite includes the Sage CRM Server and the first named user license. It's especially true through June 30, 2013, because of the current buy three get one free promotion. Now, let's compare the feature set and related costs over a 3 year commitment assuming a purchase during the month of June, 2013.

Sage CRM from BTerrell Group

Function

salesforce.com

Included

Accounts & contacts

Included

Included

Task & event tracking

Included

Included

Email integration Outlook

Included

Included

Opportunity tracking

Included

Included

Customizable sales process

Included

Included

Email templates & tracking

Included

Included

Lead scoring, routing & assignment

Included

Included

Mass email

Included

Included

Campaigns

Included

Included

Product tracking

Included

Included

Real-time quotes

Included

Included

Contract management

Included

Included

Customizable forecasts

Included

Included

Customizable dashboards

Included

Included

Analytics snapshots

Included

Included

Integration & Synchronization with Sage 300 ERP

Not Included

Included

Professional Implementation

Not Included

$3847.80

4 user licenses, 1st Yr investment

$3120

$667.80

2nd Yr investment

$3120

$667.80

3rd Yr investment

$3120

$5183.40

Total 3 year commitment

$9360

Included

Workflow & approval automation

$6000

When factoring in the cost of integration with the ERP system -- which has not even been estimated for Salesforce.com here -- Sage CRM far and away provides the better value for SMB users of Sage 300 ERP.

And, Sage won the Champion and Best Overall Value awards from Info-Tech Research Group.

The Sage CRM interactive dashboard revolutionizes the way you manage your business and how your employees manage their day. The interactive dashboard delivers a rich and personalized user experience that boosts productivity and helps drive user adoption across the business.

With the Sage CRM interactive dashboard, users can manage all their activity from one place. This includes their calendar, their tasks, their lists and web and RSS feeds, driving productivity throughout your organization and enabling your staff to accomplish more from a tailored workspace that combines the information they use every day.

Users can define their own personalized and intuitive workspace from a series of gadgets and web feeds ensuring that all content is relevant to their needs, enhancing the user experience and maximizing the productivity of your staff.

Using innovative drag and drop functionality, users can re-size and re-position gadgets, enabling them to personalize the data they see and how it is presented to them. This delivers an intuitive and convenient way to view and action items reducing the need to switch between screens. Users can manage their sales pipeline, check stock control from integrated Sage ERP systems, monitor industry news content, manage their calendar and appointments and control and process leads all from the same screen in real-time.

The Sage CRM Interactive Dashboard enables users to dynamically link multiple gadgets on a single screen, maximizing user productivity. A number of pre-installed role based dashboards are available out-of-the-box for sales, marketing, customer service and management. Users can also create bespoke company dashboards for key accounts ensuring that relevant content is available for maximum efficiency.

In our last post, we talked about what CRM is and why (generally) it is an important tool in the toolbox for businesses. Today we'll talk through some of the features as they relate to specific functions within your organization.